The Bank of England wants to introduce plastic five-pound notes - will they
really be better than paper?

Britain is to have plastic banknotes. In this we join Vietnam, Romania – oh, and the home and native land of Mark Carney, the new Governor of the Bank of England, who brought plastic notes to Canada in 2011. The Bank of England’s website, though, carries an important reason for keeping paper notes: “The feel of the paper is one of the ways of checking whether a note is genuine or not.” Plastic notes may be “wipe clean”, but which do you prefer in a restaurant, a linen cloth or a plastic item wiped clean from the last customer? Nor do plastic notes fold. So, if you have more than three or four fivers, they spring about ungovernably like a pocket full of kittens. The new notes will be smaller too, to match a deterioration in national self-esteem. The old white fiver, withdrawn in 1961, looked as if it was worth something. It was – more than £90 in today’s terms. What price plastic?